“Dear colleagues. The unbearable has happened…last Friday we discovered that one of our residents was tragically taken from us… It appears that the resident took their own life in response to acute grief…”

Calling ALL Emergency Medicine (EM) physicians – residents and attendings alike! It shouldn’t take Dr. Doty’s story or the loss by the resident’s family, friends, and colleagues suffered in order for us to recognize the importance of wellness. Our specialty is known to be high risk and it is surprising that we are so late to the game to try and change that. Well, together we can. We are a strong group of people. We see, hear, touch, and smell things that would make the average person nauseous. We are problem solvers and leaders.

This year’s JGME-ALiEM Hot Topics in Medical Education journal club features the systematic review on residency wellness recently published in the Journal of Graduate Medical Education (JGME). This week, share your thoughts about this timely topic and paper on the blog, on Twitter (follow #JGMEscholar) and during a live Google Hangout with author Kristin Raj, MD (@KristinRajMD), Christopher Doty, MD (@PoppasPearls), and Jonathan Sherbino, MD (@Sherbino). Ultimately, a curated summary of our discussions will be published in the JGME. Some of your best tweets and blog comments will be featured.(more…)

“The hardest thing for me was trying to find time to do things aside from being a resident. When you’re working six 12 hours shifts in a week, there’s only so much time left in the day to do anything else. Especially in the winter, you wake up, you get to work before the sun comes up, you work a 12 hour shift, you leave, and the sun’s gone. By the time you get home, you have enough time to wash the grime off, shovel a sandwich in your mouth, and pass out. And there was nothing else except for that.”

Unless you are living under a rock, many healthcare and public media platforms are talking about the insidious problems with burnout in the health professions world. One thought leader out there is especially vocal about wellness, resiliency, and mindfulness — Dr. Zubin Damania (alter ego: ZDoggMD). For instance, do you know the difference between empathy and compassion, and why that is important to differentiate this as a clinician? We were honored to have him join the Wellness Think Tank to field questions that we peppered at him, specifically around resident wellness.

“It’s rarely the patients that hurt me. It’s my colleagues in the hospital.”

“[Interprofessional conflict] is so underappreciated as a source of stress and misery in our job. And so often in the hospital, horrible behavior is swept underneath the rug because a) there is no pathway to address this stuff and b) it’s almost seen as de rigor for certain services to act this way. “Oh it’s the surgical service, what do you expect, that’s just the way they are.” That is what ruins me … I think that is the biggest threat to wellness in my world.”

The issues of wellness, burnout, and resiliency have snowballed across nearly all health professions. Emergency Medicine (EM) specifically was singled out as one of the specialties with highest risk for burnout at >60%.1 There has been much discussion around the general “UN-wellness” of medicine, and we now feel that there is a dire need for action. Instead of tackling the entire spectrum of wellness throughout medicine, we wanted to focus on EM residents. As a response to this need, we are proud to announce the launch of the ALiEM Wellness Think Tank, which is a private virtual community comprised of EM residents across North America. What better stakeholder group to address the world of EM residency wellness than EM residents themselves?